85

This piece emerged from a conversation with my coach about a door at the end of my hallway - a door that symbolizes the rest of my life. I want to share a reflection on addiction, not to common vices, but to something society often celebrates: work. This is a letter to myself, written from my imagined 85-year-old self.

Dear Jason,

I'm writing to you on my 85th birthday. The kids and grandkids are gathered in our house, their voices filling the rooms with chatter but no fighting. We just took a big group photo - me and my wife in the middle. I grabbed her ass right before the camera clicked, capturing that smile she's given me for longer than you've been alive.

After the photo, I took it back to my study - to that door at the end of the hall, the one you haven't yet entered. The hallway lights are off, and when you open the door, a cool breeze hits you. The room is darker and colder than you're used to now. Sunlight beams through the window curtains, highlighting old notebooks on your bookshelf. With the first step inside, you feel the cold floor draining heat from the bottoms of your feet.

This is not a place to stay. The massive room is filled with all the stuff you've collected and left behind. You haven't been here for many years - this is the room where you became work-sober, so to speak. Every step you take, you feel the heat being drained, making you feel as cold and lonely as you once were.

As children play in the living room, you place the photograph at the center of your table. Around you are old books, knickknacks on countertops, record players and speakers, a collection of chairs and rugs and art and more. Then you hear one of your kids ask, "Where's grandpa?"

A hundred small footsteps thunder toward the room as your grandkids, both small and old, bundle up by the doorway. But they dare not enter. This is the first time they've seen this room, and they can tell it's not a place you're supposed to be in - cold and dark. They look around at the collection of old things from past lives, covered in dust, delicate and adored.

When you look at them, the light peeping through the blinds dazzles your vision, and you cannot make out who stands in the hallway. But for them, you are backlit by that golden light, covered in dust like the memories in this room. As they look around, they're all thinking to themselves: Who is Grandpa? What did he do?

And you know that if you've done a good job of building the future, of giving birth to yourself many times and attending many funerals of the self, if you know you've done a good job - then they will never truly know what kind of man you used to be. Because now you are old and soft and kind.

As you walk toward the door, the kids run back to the living room to their parents. You can feel the warm air flooding into the room. And as you cross back over the threshold between your past and the present, your future, you think to yourself: everything that is behind me, and in front of me, is all that I have ever wanted.